The Transmissive Womb: Rethinking Race in Gestational Surrogacy through Environmental Epigenetics

• In Event: Personhood, Law, and Relationality Amidst the New Biosciences II

Abstract

This paper explores how emerging research on environmental epigenetics can reshape cultural and legal understandings of race in the reproductive technology of gestational surrogacy. As Sonja van Wichelen (2016: 174) critiques, understandings of kinship in gestational surrogacy are structured by a biolegitimacy discourse of ‘one’s own biological child’, which centres the genetic parent/s while devaluing the contribution of the surrogate. Drawing on interviews with gay Australian fathers who conceived children via surrogacy, I argue that dominant surrogacy discourses locate race in genetics, and construct the surrogate as a non-transmissive holding environment to bring the already raced, or race-blind, foetus to term. In an effort to rethink this binary, I bring a cultural studies approach together with the insights of STS, and environmental epigenetics in order to figure a transmissive womb. In an environmental epigenetics framework, gestation is a crucial window for environmental exposures that shape foetal gene expression. Here, a surrogate’s geo-political location, class and race shapes her environmental exposures and thus the biology of the foetus she carries. In a biopolitical sense, the surrogate’s womb is thus a racialising force. This bears significance for two key areas of thinking in STS: how to best regulate emerging biotechnologies such as surrogacy through articulating new ‘biolegitimacies’, and how to best theorise race as a kinship and legal object in a postgenomic age.

Author

• Jaya Keaney, University of Sydney